


A Lineage of Amazons

by nnozomi



Category: Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Genre: Epistolary, F/M, Futurefic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:48:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28131183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: “…looking for somebody who was never lost.” –The Picts and the Martyrs
Relationships: Nancy Blackett/John Walker
Comments: 18
Kudos: 27
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Lineage of Amazons

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jenn_Calaelen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenn_Calaelen/gifts).



Mill Hill, London, 1939

Nancy was, just perceptibly, crying.

John was silenced for a moment, feeling the same sense of horrified wrongness that had overcome him years before at the crunch of the Pike Rock stoving in _Swallow_ ’s bows. It was not that he would have interdicted Nancy from crying if she ever cared to, but the idea that she could be brought to tears in the first place.

“I’m all _right_ ,” she said impatiently, half to herself, dashing the tears off her cheeks. “Such a _galoot_ ” (and that word he hadn’t heard her use in a while). “Please, John, just pretend you’ve not seen this—anything—I’m not—“ But the last words wavered more than the first had.

“What’s wrong?” John shed his coat absently and went to sit down across from her at the small table, green-and-white oilcloth crackling. _Not because it’s my embarkation leave_ , he wondered for a moment, but the idea that Nancy would cry because he was putting to sea was laughable. No. “Your mother—Peggy—“

“Oh no, they’re fine, it’s not—“ Nancy gulped, shook her head fiercely and produced a handkerchief before John could assemble his wits enough to offer her one. She wiped her eyes methodically, blew her nose with a deliberate, resounding _poot_ , and jumped up from the table. “I expect you’d like some tea.”

“I can make it—“

“I’d rather do it. I’ll just start blubbing again, otherwise.” She ran water into Peggy’s prized copper kettle. “There’s a bit left of the fruitcake Cook sent us last time on the middle shelf in the pantry, you can fetch that. She says it’s nearly all carrot but it tastes just like her best baking to me.” Her voice was still a little higher and tighter than usual.

John did as he was told, finding a plate and two forks for the fruitcake, a respectably sized hunk, black and sticky and a little crystallized here and there. Nancy, her eyes dry, returned to the table with two steaming mugs of tea.

“Sorry to greet you that way,” she said, after a long thirsty gulp, heedless of the tea’s temperature. “I’m not exactly in the habit of breaking down in tears.”

“I know.” John watched her face through the soft clouds of steam. “Can I ask what’s up?”

“Of course.”

There was a large tin biscuit box taking up more than its fair share of room on the table. Nancy pried the lid off and extracted a packet of old-fashioned cream octavo paper, bound with a lavender ribbon—John recognized Nancy’s hand in the incongruously sailorly knot. “I had a parcel from Aunt Maria,” she said. “You remember the great-aunt.”

“I remember.”

“She’s been planning ahead for her death, apparently. Just in case there’s an invasion or some such. Of course she’s got a Will, but having quarreled with her solicitor and never made it up—“ John choked on his tea, and Nancy grinned briefly for the first time since he had come into the flat—“she’s decided to take care of a few things in advance. Most of her things will go to that friend of hers—Miss Hardison or Haversack or something—or to Mother, but she said there are a few things of Grandfather Turner’s for Uncle Jim, and some small bequests for Peggy and me—a Shentall tea set for Peggy, and for me her old black silk cloak and some of her letters.”

John looked at the satin ribbon. “Letters to…?”

“Oh, mostly to friends of hers who have predeceased her—thus the letters being in her possession again. Some family ones to Grandfather Turner and their mother and father when she was quite young. Even one or two to Uncle Jim that got returned to her because he’d gone gallivanting off to a new country somewhere and not registered his changes of address.” She sighed, and took a resolute bite of fruitcake.

John drank tea, considering. (One thing he had observed in his superior officers, at the Ship and thereafter, was that the better ones did not mind being seen taking time to think.) “What has she in mind, do you think, leaving those to you?”

“I haven’t a clue. That’s why I was trying to get started reading them, before you came—just in case there was anything—“

John put down his fork still laden with a sticky lump of cake. “Did she—well, I know you used to talk about her making your mother cry.”

“Oh. Oh no, not that sort of thing at all.” Nancy grinned, a little watery around the edges, and touched the back of his hand lightly. “Eat your cake, the Navy’s best plum duff can’t possibly live up to Cook’s productions… No, it was more like…She was so _hedged in_ when she was young. Just like the way she used to want me and Peggy to be, except we had each other, and Mother and Uncle Jim on our side, and she only had Grandfather Turner who was away at school most of the year and hadn’t much time for her anyway…and I should have thought she’d have liked it, but she _didn’t_. You can tell from the letters. I kept—well, wishing I’d been there when she was our age—I don’t mean now, I mean when we had _Amazon_ and _Swallow_ —and could take her out sailing…or…” She swallowed.

John watched the fine tendrils of loose hair shift about her face as she spoke, her neat square hands, one still holding her fork, moving in neat square shapes to illustrate her points.

“ _John_ ,” she said impatiently, and he realized she had stopped speaking and he hadn’t responded.

“You should write to her, then,” he said, only a little at random.

“I suppose I should. I’d be a bit…I wouldn’t know what to…” Nancy poured more tea for both of them. “Before the invasion, I suppose?”

John was shaken out of both sets of thoughts. “It’s not just the great-aunt—I mean, your Aunt Maria—being alarmist,” he said slowly. “You’ll hear things when you get your Wren posting. I’ve heard rumblings on board already. It’s coming.”

“Certainly it would be Aunt Maria’s style to accurately predict her own death in wartime before the war’s even started,” Nancy allowed, sounding a little more collected than she had. “I’ve heard a few things already myself. Peggy has a very active gossip network that reaches quite surprising places, I’ll have you know.”

John grinned, and offered her the last chunk of cake. “I would never underestimate the first mate, not with Susan as an example.”

Nancy broke the piece of fruitcake in half, revealing the stained-glass brightness of a sliver of candied orange peel, and returned one half to him. “John. What were you thinking just now, looking at me that way?”

“I…” John found himself caught in stillness for a moment, one hand holding his tea mug halfway to his mouth, until the hot earthenware stung his knuckles and he set it down carefully. “I…”

Nancy pushed the fruitcake plate sideways and laid her hands flat down on the table in front of her, the oilcloth crackling. “Do you want to…?” she said, her voice taking on a plangency through the Captain-Nancy briskness that he had heard her speak with only a few times. “If we’re talking of setting one’s affairs in order before the invasion, it isn’t only Aunt Maria who’s…We needn’t—needn’t marry, or anything like that, if you didn’t want to, but—Do you want to…?”

John drank her in, speechless, feeling once again the mast topple and the boat drive itself aground.

M. H. Lee to G. D. Lu, 1936




My dearest Ah Djen,

How do you fare at Cambridge? Has your research proceeded well? I am so happy that you are safe in England. As short as our time together there was, your letters have been a precious tie to Cambridge for me; I know you have many old friends in Nanking and Hong Kong as well, but perhaps it amuses you from time to time to tell your English friends that you correspond regularly with a pirate.

I hope my fellow “Li” people there are very well, your friends Yuese and Dafei. You will forgive me for having lost their original English names, as a mere classicist cannot be expected to remember the exotic names of scientists! You will tell them once again to take good care of you, so alone so far away.

It sometimes seems a dream to me now that I too was once there, 沈澱著彩虹似的夢, though unlike Mr. Hsu I wrote no poems when I left Cambridge, my heart was too dry. You note that though I quote his farewell in Chinese, I write to you in English so that I will not forget too much. Not so long ago I seemed to dream of English students coming to me, making me a classics mistress here in my own Dragon Islands, and yet sailing away from me in the end. Cambridge and its works slip always through my fingers.

Here the mainland darkens rapidly under the shadow of Dongyang, and we Dragon Island people and our junks feel it as well. Soon I will need to make a choice for us. I consult my old friend Xenophon often for his advice, as he commanded more men than I at just my own age; his “Anabasis” has more to say to me than the words of my ten-gong Taicoons, who are too old or too young, who believe too firmly now in my own will.

 _Hoc volo, sic jubeo…sit pro voluntate ratio_. My father told me to make my own judgments and I do. I am grateful to him now where once I was only resentful (have I become truly filial in my middle years?). I could have been bound in the confines of one man’s house, perhaps one of those Taicoons who look to me for orders now; I could have spent all my life on this one island, never setting foot even on my own sampan. My father bound me to the Dragon Islands, but he gave all they are to me in return, my cliffs and gorges, my dragons, my bamboo groves, my people, my junks. οἰ δὲ νάων φαῖσ᾽ ἐπὶ γᾶν μέλαιναν ἔμμεναι κάλλιστον, and I do too. My father dealt honestly with me.

My dear Ah Djen, I don’t know when I shall see you again, but I think of you and I think of Cambridge still. …

Notorious Chinese Lady Pirate Joins Forces with British Navy

Foochow, April 13, 1937, Reuters: On Friday, Admiral Sir Percy Noble, Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy’s China Station, met with Madam Lee Mei-Hsing, self-styled Tycoon of the Dragon Islands, to sign a treaty of alliance against the Japanese. Madam Lee has a chequered record of harrying British ships as a privateer, but both sides have agreed that with the greater threat of the hostile Imperial Japanese Navy in view, now is the time to put aside old quarrels for the moment. While Madam Lee commands a small fleet of mainly old-fashioned Chinese junks and sampans, her men know the waters and are experienced in taking on larger and better-armed vessels. Madam Lee herself, an Old Britain Hand educated at Great Marlow and Cambridge, will direct her forces in liaison with Commander E. H. R. Walker of the HMS _Delight_ …

A peak in Darien, 1939

Two captains quondam et futurus were sitting on the deck of a houseboat, fishing.

John had never been as fond of fishing as Roger was; he would rather be sailing, or swimming, in motion somehow, and the tug-of-will or art with the fish didn’t interest him terribly. Given how rapidly everything had been moving around him over the last few weeks, though, he was beginning to see the appeal of sitting very quietly and letting the fish handle the motion.

Next to him, far enough that their lines wouldn’t tangle but near enough to converse if they cared to, Captain Flint was humming quietly to himself (it was hard to tell whether it was a tune John did not know, or off-key enough that he wouldn’t have recognized it anyway) and giving his fishing rod an occasional gentle twitch. He was wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat so battered that it looked as if it might date back to his boyhood.

A sailboat passed by, heading across the lake—not quite on the right tack for Wild Cat Island. Just a bit larger than _Swallow_ or _Amazon_ , with one boy at the tiller and another adjusting the sail. Or perhaps they were girls; their shorts and shirts gave away nothing, and their hair was hidden under their caps. Did small girls these days wear their hair as short as the Amazons had done, or were plaits and pigtails the rule now? Bridgie had a long plait she often played with when in thought, but she was older than the children in the boat. The boy (or girl) at the tiller called to the other, a light voice with a firm crisp inflection, the words lost to the lake wind.

“Takes you back, eh?” said Captain Flint, gazing over the water as the sailboat tacked. “I used to watch you lot coming and going that way, your first summer here. Pity I was so annoyed with all of you most of the time.” He flicked at his fishing line and frowned. “Not a nibble today. The wind’s wrong, maybe… I’d have done better back then not to take against you before I’d even talked to you. Saved us all a lot of trouble.”

John winced. “You needn’t have remembered that. You apologized to me when you knew differently.” He thought. “You were very decent about it. Not everyone bothers to apologize seriously to a thirteen-year-old, and you must have thought I was a bit of an old-fashioned prig.”

“I was in the habit of taking thirteen-year-olds seriously, wasn’t I? Do you think Nancy would have let me get away with doing otherwise? –Although then again, some of it was down to Nancy in the first place.”

“Because she let off the—what was it?—the firework?”

“No, well, that too. But she wouldn’t have taken it as hard as you did, me calling you a liar. Not because you were a prig of any kind, mind, old-fashioned or new-fangled. An honest man then and now. Nancy, on the other hand—she always did have a gift for being creative with the truth.”

“She hadn’t!” John protested, putting aside the quiet flush of pleasure at the unexpected praise in surprise at the strength of his need to defend Nancy in absentia. “She wouldn’t have lied about a thing like that, any more than I would have.”

“Not in that sense, no, but—You remember the summer after that, when our Aunt Maria came to visit?”

“The summer I wrecked _Swallow_ ,” John corrected automatically. “Yes, the great-aunt. What has she to do with it?” He recalled suddenly the glimpse they had once had of Nancy and Peggy at the mercy of their great-aunt: two prim and proper young girls in frocks, hats and gloves, hair shining and faces demure. Was it that image of the two of them she had borne in mind, getting her unexpected bequests ready? Could it be called a lie?

Captain Flint snorted. “Nancy was always good at acting Ruth when she had to, and while that may not be a lie on the face of it, no more it’s who she is. Not to speak of the Amazon pirates.”

“But we all did that. I mean—“ John ran aground on the right wording for the worlds they had lived in those holidays, not a lie in the sense of what Captain Flint had once accused him of, nor yet the literal truth of aertex vests and cutting sandwiches and French verbs, not—

“Creative with the truth, like I said. Your Titty, now, believed every word of her Peter Duck stories—oh, she knew what was true and what wasn’t, but while the story was happening she lived in it. Nancy was a bit more, mm, conscious of what she was engaged in. Don’t get the wrong idea, by the way, I’m not speaking ill of either one of them. Valuable qualities when called for, both.”

There was a soft, swirling tug on the end of John’s line; he adjusted his grip on the rod, but it slackened again almost immediately. Just the wind shifting the water, or else a fish that had seen the light in good time for its own health. “I suppose,” he ventured, after some thought, “with someone like the great-aunt, Nancy had to learn to do that a bit…what you call creativity with the truth. Either that or…well, be Ruth all the time.”

“She learned to be a bit ruthless, yes,” Captain Flint said drily. “So did her mother and I, albeit rather more painfully. We had Aunt Maria all the time, after all, not just on the occasional holiday.”

“But you still escaped now and then, didn’t you?” John remembered a tin box and a mountain peak. “You climbed Kanchenjunga. I mean, the Matterhorn. I mean—“

“What? Ah—yes. Molly and Bob Blackett and I…Bob would have liked you Swallows. He was a bit like you in some ways. Calm. Clear-sighted. Knew how to manage a motley crew—I couldn’t stick at anything as a boy unless it interested me, and if it did I couldn’t think of anything else. And Molly—always a little bit of a thing though she was older than me—she was an Amazon all right.” He chuckled. “Remember our Miss Lee? She reminded me of Molly every now and then. A bit of a shock to the system, that… Molly couldn’t be satisfied unless she’d proved she could do it, whatever it was, as well as a boy or better. She and I used to go at it like hammer and tongs in the boat, the old _Foxfire_. Bob had his work cut out for him.”

“…Like having a crew of Roger and Nancy—or perhaps Roger crossed with Dick Callum and Nancy,” John speculated, amused.

“Very like. Now, my father would have seen eye to eye with Roger. He was a mining engineer, and some of his bits of ingenuity…Well, that’s a story for another day. Speaking of Nancy,” Captain Flint said, mildly, and yet something in his tone made John’s hands fumble his fishing rod. “I’d been under the impression that the two of you had something of an understanding. Is there a reason you’re spending the tail-end of your embarkation leave up here instead of down in London where she is?”

“I… Nancy…”

He couldn’t explain (to Nancy’s uncle!) all the minutiae of their conversations, the small dances of give-and-take, strike-and-parry that had gradually emerged between them, in some ways an adult version in miniature of the friendly rivalry that had set _Swallow_ and _Amazon_ racing down the lake against each other so many times. In their more private iterations, a particular throaty inflection in her voice, his fingertips finding the thin skin inside her wrist where the veins showed blue, the exact hazel-flecked autumnal brown of her irises, her gaze fixed on the hollow of his throat one warm afternoon when he had undone a button at his shirt collar—

John swallowed. “She asked me if I’d like to get married,” he said aloud, relieved and ashamed when Captain Flint only nodded with an encouraging grunt, seeming not at all surprised. “--I said I wasn’t interested,” he went on, omitting at a blow any excuses he might make. Either Captain Flint would understand it anyway, or any amount of explaining would be no use.

“Did you,” said Captain Flint, in a very neutral tone.

“I’m—it’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. A great deal actually.” He looked down at the water below them. “Nancy deserves more than—oh damn and blast, there’s no way to talk of these things without sounding like one of those potboilers Dot Callum refuses to lower herself to, is there?” (Captain Flint chuckled, having apparently heard of this contretemps somewhere, probably via Peggy.) “You said it once,” John blurted. “To have a job and know how to do it is one of the best things in this life.”

“I did, didn’t I?” Captain Flint looked out across the lake. “Our Miss Lee and her hand with a ship, I recall. Imagine you remembering that. Well now.”

“Nancy—you know what she is. Think of her in the kind of little house a junior naval officer like me can afford, cooking dinner and raising children. I don’t mean she couldn’t do it. I expect she could. But it wouldn’t be for anyone’s good, would it? If I’m to have a job and know how to do it, how could I—“ he recalled suddenly the words Nancy had used of Aunt Maria—“hedge her in that way, without one?”

Captain Flint chewed on his straw. “Mate Susan would have a few things to say about the idea that cooking dinner and raising children isn’t a job, I expect. So might your mother.”

“Oh, I know. But— _Nancy_.”

“Fair enough.” Captain Flint sighed, and began to reel in his line. “I believe they’ve had it away with the bait some time ago, thieving beggars…” He popped open the bait tin, an old tobacco one repurposed, for another fat worm. “So you told Nancy you weren’t interested… . I hadn’t ever expected to have to call you a liar again, John.”

John was silent, watching the grey-blue gleam of water below them.

Maria Turner to Cecilia Huskisson, 1932

My dear Celia,

I must thank you again for such a refreshing holiday at Harrogate, and for your kindness in allowing me to bore you so often with tales of my great-nieces. I know you will understand when I say that in some ways I think of them as my granddaughters, as after all I was tasked with raising their mother.

I do hope you will not hold against me my rather sharp rejoinder to your remark about admiring my great-nieces’ mischief. I feel safe in saying that we know each other too well for these things to trouble us.

I must admit, however, that I have awakened in the night more than once since then to consider your comment again.

You and I have not often discussed our long-ago childhoods, but I imagine that, like me, you spent your girlhood under the auspices of a strict governess. You, at least, would have been fortunate enough to share the classroom with your sisters, while I recall waiting eagerly for my brother James to come home from Oundle every holiday.

It was, of course, a great blow to me when James and Margaret were lost to us, the more so when finding their children left in my care. I am sure I have mentioned to you that my nephew Jim was expelled from _three_ schools in his youth, causing me great shame and discomfort. I cannot feel that young men of his generation—or any other—truly understand the privilege it is to be allowed to attend school. I had hoped that he would take a good university degree, given his intelligence, but he preferred to take a vagabond path around the globe. I cannot tell you how much concern I expended over his whereabouts and his safety in his young days. It is, at least, a small comfort that he has now settled down near his sister and has even become, I understand, something of a celebrated author in his own niche. I have not, naturally, ventured to read his work, fearing that it might not be suitable.

Mary was in her way a great trouble to me as well, constantly accompanying, if anything leading her brother into mischief; it was a relief to us all when she married the Blacketts’ boy, and I was only thankful that I was able to be a support to her when she was bereaved in such an untimely fashion, with two small daughters.

They in their turn were as harum-scarum as Mary herself not so very long ago, but as I told you, I was most pleased on my visit this summer to find them much grown and matured, particularly Ruth, the elder. She does remind me in some ways of Mary as a child, though she resembles the Blacketts’ boy more in looks; my younger niece, Margaret, takes after her mother (who in turn takes after mine) in appearance. It is a great relief to me that my own features have not been passed on.

As obstreperous as Mary was in her childhood, her long widowhood seems to have deprived her of the firmness of which, if anything, a woman alone must for her own sake be possessed. I should be more content if she were to show rather more of a spine and have the courage of her convictions. Though I should not like Ruth to become overconfident, I am glad indeed to see that she appears to have developed the steadfast poise which will see her through.

Can you imagine, Celia, what our generation would have made of the opportunities given to young women today? I should like to see what the combination of the discipline which we underwent and the chances of which they are possessed would achieve. Should you not? …

On the train to Pompey, 1939

While they had not quite managed perfect privacy, the early hour—they had taken the first train out of Waterloo—meant that they shared the six-seat compartment only with two Norwegian merchant seamen, leaning against one another in a sleep so heavy that John foresaw having to shake them awake when the train arrived at Portsmouth. During the whole ride they snored occasionally but did not stir.

Nancy, free to carry only a small rucksack (perhaps the one she had used on the Lake then) compared to John’s embarkation kit, lost no time in producing a Thermos of coffee and a surprising number of sandwiches. “Peggy,” she explained, a little abashed. “Once a mate, always a mate. I told her she needn’t, but—“

“Jolly good of her.” John, accustomed to early rising, still accepted the coffee gratefully. “And of you, coming down all the way to Pompey with me only to turn around and go back. I oughtn’t to have suggested it.”

“I might still find a decent ship to stow away on,” Nancy said thoughtfully. “No, I still have to wait for my Wren telegram.” She cleared her throat. “Just as well you turned me down the other day, by the way. I hadn’t taken on board that Wrens aren’t allowed to be married. A close shave.”

“I was…that was…” John fit the cup back carefully onto the Thermos. _Creative with the truth_ , he thought in Captain Flint’s words, and heard a shade of that in Nancy’s voice. “I wanted to talk about that.”

“You needn’t explain anything. I was a galoot to speak up in the first place.” Once again the familiar Captain-Nancy term rang a little false, a reminder that the Amazon pirate was not precisely equivalent to all of Nancy any more than the primly dressed and coiffed Miss Ruth.

“You weren’t,” John said, stumbling a little over the words in his need to focus on the shifting images he saw in her. “I was one, to say I wasn’t interested—“ He watched her eyes glint with gold, a moment of early morning sunlight through the dusty train window. “I am. I always will be. I didn’t want to—you shouldn’t be—“ He took a breath, reminding himself that he was a grownup and a naval officer and had no business stammering like a rating on his first ship. “I didn’t want to make you feel the way the great-aunt did.”

“ _John._ ” Nancy set down the sandwich she was holding on the seat next to her and turned to face him full on. “You are the last person who could ever make me feel that way, married or not. Is _that_ all you meant?”

John let out his breath. “You were—you’d been crying over the great-aunt and the things she hadn’t been allowed to do. I was afraid I’d end up putting you in the same position.”

“Well, is that all you think of me? I’m not in the habit of letting people—even you—put me in positions I don’t want to be in.”

“Neither is your Aunt Maria. But even she—“

“Yes, all right, I see your point.” Nancy looked down at the rucksack on her knees, scowling. “John. Next time just say what you mean, all right? I didn’t have a very nice few days, hearing you tell me how wrong-headed I was to think you’d want to marry me.”

“I’m sorry,” John said, watching her eyes. “If it helps, I didn’t have a very nice time either, telling myself how wrong-headed I’d been.” He swallowed. “Will you ask me again, after the—after you’ve done your worst to the Wrens?”

Nancy chuckled, a little shakily. “I expect I will, if you make it worth my while. If you’ll tell me the truth all down the line.”

“It ought to be possible,” John said tentatively, feeling his way, “for—alliance—to give one a larger scope. Like _Amazon_ and _Swallow_.”

“With two captains,” Nancy agreed. “In balance. Remember Peewitland?” They both winced. “All’s well that ended well,” Nancy went on, “and it took both of us to do it—and our crews—but we could have done it better.”

“My father says,” John recalled, “that the measure of an officer is how much good he can get out of his men. Or women,” he added, reflecting that Daddy must have had Susan and Titty (and Bridget) in mind at the time as well as Roger when he thought of _Swallow_ ’s crew.

“Jibbooms and bobstays!” Nancy said, clarion, half mocking herself. “And the measure of a pirate is how much she can get out of hers. Look at me and Peggy.” She pushed the rucksack off her knees onto the seat, squashing her abandoned sandwich, and held out a hand. “Shake on it?”

John shook her hand solemnly, and kept holding it. Coffee and sandwiches were a little harder to consume with only one free hand each, but they managed all the way to Portsmouth.

**Author's Note:**

> Notes on the Miss Lee section: Her correspondent is a historical figure; in the world in which Miss Lee existed, the eminent scientist Lu Gwei-djen arrived at Cambridge as an undergraduate, about fifteen years earlier than she did in our world, to allow them to share digs there.  
> In Chinese, Miss Lee quotes Xu Zhimo’s 1928 poem “On Leaving Cambridge,” roughly along the lines of “as rainbow-like dreams settle in sediment.” _Hoc volo…_ , also quoted by Roger in the book, is Juvenal: “I want this, so I order it; let my will stand for reasoned judgment.” Here she reverses the order of the last phrase: “let reasoned judgment stand for my will.” The line of Greek she quotes is Sappho, translated by A.S. Kline as “some say a fleet of ships is the loveliest vision in this dark world.”


End file.
